Safety nets failed to halt fatal slide to mental illness

By Peter J. Holleypholley@express-news.net :
December 9, 2010

Tavan Cullum: He was gunned down at the end of a slow-speed chase on Interstate 10.

Photo By JOHN DAVENPORT/jdavenport@express-news.net

After Tavan Cullum set fire to his family’s home, he led law officers on a slow-speed chase along Interstate 10. He was shot to death outside Boerne when he pointed a gun at police.

By the time police arrived outside his parents’ two-story home on a winding street in Northwest San Antonio, Tavan Cullum was barricaded in his upstairs bedroom, clinging to a loaded 12-gauge shotgun.

Days later, he would set fire to the house, jump on a motorcycle and lead police on a low-speed chase that ended with his death when he pointed a handgun at officers.

But on the afternoon of Nov. 29, his panicked screams and threats to kill himself, audible from a neighbor’s driveway, had Cullum’s family members nervously discussing their dwindling options with police officers.

After his death, family members said police should have responded to their requests for an emergency commitment to a mental health facility. An investigation is under way, Police Chief William McManus said Wednesday.

Afraid to go back inside their home, the family asked police to execute an emergency detention to get Cullum to a mental health facility, but officers seemed reluctant to enter the house and confront the burly 31-year-old, family members recalled.

Officers tried unsuccessfully to reach Cullum by phone, family members said. Their attempts to reach the department’s four-person Mental Health Unit, which typically responds to 10 to 15 calls a night involving the mentally ill, also were unsuccessful, family members noted.

As the stalemate dragged on for nearly an hour, an officer offered the Cullum family members a final suggestion, one that left them in shock:

Just leave.

“Just do what now?” Cullum’s father, Bobby Cullum, 63, asked in surprise, according to a cell phone recording provided to the San Antonio Express-News that caught parts of the conversation.

“Just leave,” the officer replied moments after he told the family Cullum eventually would kill himself, whether it was this year or next. “But it applies a lot to the guys that are drinking a lot — they get drunk, you just let ’em sleep it off.”

But Tavan Cullum, a whip-smart medical school graduate with plans to become a neurosurgeon, had not been drinking, though he may have been self-medicating with marijuana, his family said.

He was slipping further into a muddled state of delusion and paranoia, the result of an undiagnosed mental illness that had began over the summer and worsened in recent weeks, family members said.

The incident was the second day in a row — and the sixth time in two months, according to police reports, family estimates and phone records — that officers had been summoned to the home in the 11200 block of Whisper Willow.

Cullum’s erratic behavior and threats had become so frightening that family members had begun keeping a rotating watch outside his room at night. He had purchased a shotgun at a local gun store in recent weeks, family members said.

At no point, family members said, did the officers refer them to any city services.

“What is it going to take?” Bobby Cullum recalled asking police. “Is he going to have to kill his whole family to get something done?”

Sixty hours after their Nov. 29 standoff, his son set a fire at the house and led police up Interstate 10 on a motorcycle, a handgun periodically tucked beneath his chin.

Police eventually shot and killed Cullum after he cast his bike aside and pointed the gun at officers outside downtown Boerne while stunned motorists looked on.

It was the first officer-involved shooting in that community in more than two decades, Boerne Police Chief Gary Miller said.

It was a death, family members say, that should have been avoided.

“We’re conservative people and we have the utmost respect for law enforcement,” Bobby Cullum said, holding back tears in the hotel room where the family members are staying while they look for new housing. “But for some reason, the police refused to detain my son when he was a danger to himself and everyone around him.”

The oldest of three kids, Tavan Cullum was “the rock of the family,” protective and earnest, his father said. Those instincts, coupled with a sharp mind, steady hands and a fascination with the human brain, found a home in Cullum’s growing passion for neurosurgery.

“He was very driven and wanted to do humanitarian work abroad,” his father recalled. “He felt like it was a responsibility to take care of people.”

After graduating from medical school at St. George’s University in the Caribbean island of Grenada last spring, Cullum moved home to study for licensing exams and prepare for a residency at a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital, family members said.

After months of studying for 13 hours a day, however, he grew distant, and by the fall his behavior deteriorated, they said.

At one point, he sold the family’s car and bought a motorcycle, then disappeared to Mexico for a week.

The Cullums tried to get him to a hospital, but he refused to go. The family began calling police but “they wouldn’t take him to a hospital until he was threatening to kill himself or hurt other people,” said Tavan’s brother, Ben Cullum, 30.

“But by the time he was a threat to people’s safety, they still refused to take action,” he said.

A peace officer can detain someone without a warrant if they think the person is mentally ill and poses “a substantial risk of serious harm to the person or to others,” according to the Texas Mental Health Code.

Any adult can also ask a judge to order officers to take such a person to a mental health facility, where they can be held for up to 48 hours, but must be assessed within the first 12 hours.

Declining to comment on the specifics of the Nov. 28 and Nov. 29 incidents, police said each call is handled individually.

“In some cases an emergency detention is warranted. Our goal is to ensure the safety of all parties involved,” department spokesman Chris Benavides said.

McManus said an internal investigation will examine how the calls from the Cullum home were handled.

“We became aware of that issue or concern — the day of the shooting. We immediately opened an investigation,” he said.

Kym Bolado, president of the San Antonio chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, or NAMI, said the officers who came to Cullum’s house had no other choice but to detain him if they felt he “was threatening his life or the community’s life.”

The incident “speaks to a lack of training at the Police Department” that was particularly tragic because McManus has made mental health education a top department priority.

Preparing for their son’s funeral this week, the Cullums confronted another painful development: three bullet wounds to their son’s face would deny him an open casket, a preacher informed them.

“Once he got on that motorcycle and drove off with the police chasing him, I knew it was too late,” Bobby Cullum said as he stood in the doorway of his fire-damaged home a day after his son was killed by police. “But before then I think he could have been saved.”